Gangtok is still bemused by Jyotiraditya Scindia addressing Sikkimese crowds in Nepali. What can it portend? A late recruit to was expected to regard Hindi as mandatory, especially after Delhi had been purged of spies and saboteurs lurking in colonial clubs.
Instead, Scindia has sparked feverish speculation about princely merger, monarchical revival and the Centre's stranglehold.
His linguistic adventurism may have reminded older listeners that when the Janata, not Cockroach Janta, Party came to power in 1977, the venerable Morarji Desai offered his brilliant but tragically doomed father the pick of any ambassadorship he liked save Kathmandu. Although the servility that seems essential for survival in Suvendu Adhikari's Gorkhaland-in-waiting wasn't quite so marked then, Madhavrao Scindia was probably not entirely trusted by the power-brokers of the day. He was too fluent in Nepali and too close to the stellar players on the Himalayan stage which didn't then flaunt firebrands like the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha chief, Bimal Gurung.
Understandably perhaps, the children of those veterans now mutter that Desai's discrimination was nothing compared to the exclusion that today's ruling lotus-eaters practised in Calcutta's newly-christened Lok Bhaban by not sparing a higher rank than minister of state for Bishal Lama, the re-elected scheduled tribe MLA from Kalchini, Alipurduar. Discrimination seems all the more glaring because Lama is locally lionised for swiftly solving the water crisis faced by some 1,300 tea garden workers as well as local residents. It was at Lama's instance that a new pump was installed at the Chinchula Tea Garden, which had been closed since September 26, subjecting everyone to an acute water shortage. "... ensuring security, dignity and justice for our community is... crucial", declared Lama, after trouncing his Trinamool Congress rival by 37,843 votes to retain his seat.
No wonder the organisers chanted ", Service to people is our purpose." But the Hindu fundamentalists among the party bosses in Delhi - Calcutta doesn't count - were not at all anxious to reward what they might call caste . Not only is Lama a practising Buddhist but he is especially popular among ordinary folk for frequently sharing Tibetan Buddhist music, prayers, and religious chants on his YouTube channel.
North Bengal acutely resents not having had a Gorkha cabinet minister since Deo Prakash Rai in 1971. Gorkha nationalism has gathered force since then. Some 1,200 people have been killed in the attendant violence. As the recent expansion of Adhikari's government demonstrated, any Ram-Shyam can grab a chair in the upper echelons of Writers' Buildings or Nabanna provided the nobs at the top regard him as a caste Hindu. No Gorkha has been deemed good enough for that glory in these 55 years. Anandamay Barman, a Rajbanshi who represents the Matigara-Naxalbari constituency, hasn't progressed beyond the rank of minister of state either. "If this is not discrimination, what is?" asked angrily, citing both victims.
One is tempted to dismiss such differentiation as evidence of backwardness in BIMARU states (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) that the demographer, Ashish Bose, lumped under an acronym that recalled the Hindi word for 'sick'. Readers might protest that it couldn't possibly apply to Bengal, which pioneered India's Renaissance. But a comparison with erstwhile East Pakistan confirms that Bengal's elite class/caste leadership enabled the state to cling to longer than East Pakistan. The high proportion of landless Muslim cultivators on daily hire among East Pakistanis was an additional reason for speedier abolition of feudal landholding.
Nothing gives the lie to the legend of Bengal's benign secularism more convincingly than the murderous pathos of Tagore's in which a young girl is beheaded for worshipping at a Buddhist stupa, which Ajatashatru, the powerful 5th-century BC ruler of Magadha, had outlawed.
Bengal's 282,898 Buddhists, as noted in 2022, and the 125,182 in Tripura, are relics of several once-flourishing Buddhist empires. If India was home to a mere 4,08,080 Buddhists when their co-religionists in the much smaller, Muslim-majority Bangladesh numbered 10,07,468, it was largely because Brahmin persecution forced Indian Buddhists to flee across the Meghna and Padma rivers. Muslim oppression came later. The loss of royal patronage and the enmity of kings like Ajatashatru were more relevant in the growth of Hindu bigotry. As a contemporary of Mahavira and Gautama Buddha, Ajatashatru, the Haryanka dynasty's second-most powerful ruler, must have been well aware of the identity, beliefs and preachings of those he saw as adversaries.
Misled by their Mongolian features, I asked several men I met on this return to the Northeast if they were Bhutiya, Lepcha or Limbu, the three major components of Lho, Mon, Tsong, which define Sikkim's core identity. The answer in each case was "Buddhist". The Chogyal of Sikkim, whose 103rd birthday was celebrated on May 22 as Sikkim's national day, would have been delighted. Religion is identity for the youth of North Bengal and Sikkim, possibly more so since Anjel Chakma, a 24-year-old management student from Tripura, was murdered in Dehradun last December. Taking their cue from the highest in the land, Anjel's killers decided he was a . Or a cockroach.
Thereby hangs a tale. A civilised personage like the Chogyal's Tibetan first wife was prompted to ask what a Japanese gentleman was doing in India's foreign office: the man in question was the Chittagonian, Subimal Dutt, of the Indian Civil Service, India's former foreign secretary and first envoy to Bangladesh. He looked far more Mongolian than Anjel.
Scindia's weakest point (in Desai's view) may have been his son's strongest. Madhavrao's grandmother was the daughter of Nepal's former commander-in-chief who himself was a nephew of the legendary Jang Bahadur, the founder of the Rana dynasty. If they weren't fluent in Nepali, or perhaps a dialect of it, the language has no business existing. In certain privileged sections of communication, Madhavrao's fluency might have even facilitated exchanges by conveying subtle meanings even if those meanings are as unexplained as the circulating on the eve of the great uprising of 1857.
The mystery extends to Darjeeling. Did Chogyal Tsugphud Namgyal give the territory to the East India Company? Or did the British forge a deed of gift? Did the that Sardar D.K. Sen sent to London in 1947 on behalf of the Durbar justify asking India for the station's return? How seriously should India have taken Gyalmo Hope Namgyal's argument in the June 1966 issue of the that Tsugphud Namgyal could transfer user's rights but not ownership because land in Sikkim has never been the king's private possession?
"Sikkim has merged but will not be submerged", reiterated Sikkim's first ethnic Nepali chief minister, Nar Bahadur Bhandari. But what of the furore over an allegedly false document on the Sikkim-Darjeeling merger "issued under the signature of the Union Home Minister" as reported by ? According to the paper, the fabricated letter was inspired by the malicious intent to spread misinformation, create panic and disturb public order as well as Sikkim's communal harmony. Clearly, some deadly foe has it in for Amit Shah. Or are we being told that the campaign is inspired by envy of India's fairytale journey under Narendra Modi from '' to ''?
It's a grave challenge that the new BJP team faces as it sets about exploiting money and power to punish Mamata Banerjee's defiance by destroying the remnants of her Trinamool Congress instead of attending to past and present grievances. Seeing them being sworn in, it was difficult to spot any outstanding sign of promise. Or any indication of qualitative improvement on their predecessors or even the ministers before them. One feared instead that the massive representation of Hanuman, a garishly painted 40-ft figure whose bulbous gaze rests unseeing on the untidiness of Kurseong's Naya Busty and the pristine acres of tea rolling away beyond, will probably bear witness to the antics of another god that failed.